The John M. Olin Library is the primary research library for the social sciences and humanities, and the Harold D. Uris Library has extensive holdings in the humanities and social sciences. The Albert R. Mann Library specializes in agriculture, the life sciences, and human ecology. The Carl M. Kroch Library includes the university's Rare & Manuscript Collections as well as its extensive Asia Collections. The Southeast Asia Collection at the Kroch Library, named in honor of John M. Echols, has been a joint undertaking of the university, the library, and the Southeast Asia Program with the goal of acquiring a copy of every publication of research value produced in the countries of Southeast Asia and publications about the region published in other parts of the world.[3]

History

Initially, the system was a collection of 18,000 volumes stored in Morrill Hall. Daniel Willard Fiske, Cornell's first librarian, donated his entire estate to the university upon his death, as did President Andrew Dickson White. Under Fiske's direction, Cornell's library introduced a number of innovations, including allowing undergraduate students to browse through the books and check them out. By 1885, the library had installed electric lights and stayed open 12 hours per day (instead of only a few hours per week—as most other libraries at American universities did at the time—just enough time for faculty to check out and return books), which allowed students to use it as a reference library.[4]

Initiatives

The library plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents. It provides stewardship and partial funding for arXiv.org e-print archive, created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg. arXiv has changed the way many physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the eprint a viable and popular form for announcing new research.

The "Project Euclid" initiative (named after Euclid of Alexandria) creates one resource joining commercial journals with low-cost independent journals in mathematics and statistics. The project is aimed at enabling affordable scholarly communication through the Internet. Besides archival purposes, primary goals of the project is to facilitate journal searches and interoperatibility between different publishers.

The Cornell Library Digital Collections are online collections of historical documents. Featured collections include the Database of African-American Poetry, the Historic Math Book Collection, the Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection, the Witchcraft Collection, and the Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection.

Rare holdings

The library houses several rare manuscripts. It houses one of the five copies of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863)—the only such to be privately owned and the only one accompanied both by a letter from Lincoln transmitting the manuscript and by the original envelope addressed and franked by Lincoln.[5] The library houses cuneiform tablets; a major collection of medieval books and witchcraft trial records; thousands of pamphlets produced during the French Revolution; and the correspondence between Jefferson and Lafayette. It also holds a copy of The Birds of America,[6] which is considered the most expensive book in the world.[7] The library also has first editions of Darwin's "Origin of Species" (1859),[8] the Book of Mormon (1830),[9] and of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813).[10]

General Collection

The archive's collections include multimedia artworks that reflect the transformation of new media art practices from analog to disc-based and from there to networked and web-based application during the past decades.[12] The collections combine artworks produced on CD/ DVD-Rom, VHS/digital video and internet (online and offline holdings) as well as supporting materials, such as unpublished manuscripts and designs, digital and photographic documentation of installations and performances, digital ephemera, interviews, photographs, catalogues, monographs, and resource guides to new media art.[13] The general collection consists of various material about audio/ sound art, eco/ bio art, exhibitions and artist compilations, installations, interactive narrative and poetry, online listserv and internet art journals, performance, theory and critic, video art and cinema. A few artists whose work can be found in the general collection are: Hershman Leeson Lynn, Hill Gary, Iimura Takahiko, Lister Ardele, Snow Michael, Janet Cardiff, Chantal Akerman, Tashiro Charles, Barbier Annette, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Shu Lea Cheang, Quintanilla Grace. The collection contains work ranging from the 1960s up to the present day.

The Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is located in the Carl A. Kroch Library; access is through Olin Library.

Preservation

Because of the fragility and the complexity of the artworks,[22] most of which are born-digital and many of which interactive, the Archive focus on building archival strategies that endure the continuous access to all this fragile material. The Goldsen Archive is one of the six international digital art archives dedicated to Preservation and Documentation Strategies; other similar archives are Ars Electronica, Tate Intermedia, FACT, computerfinearts.com (which has its repository in Goldsen Archive) and Rhizome Artbase.[23] In addition, the Archive has signed the International Declaration "Media Art Needs Global Networked Organization and Support", sponsored by Media Art History. Org.[24] The Goldsen Archive has completed a National Endowment for the Humanities- funded preservation initiative that aims to make the access to complex interactive and digital born media artworks simple and more reliable which will allow these artworks to be used and viewed on modern computers.[25]

Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL)[33] Movies and photos of hundreds of working mechanical-systems models at Cornell University. Also includes an e-book library[34] of classic texts on mechanical design and engineering.